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What is an encryption backdoor? | TechCrunch

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Summary
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72% Informative

U.K. government seeking to force Apple to open up iCloud ’s end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) device backup offering.

Officials were said to be leaning on Apple to create a “backdoor” in the service that would allow state actors to access data in the clear.

A backdoor is a term typically deployed to describe a secret vulnerability inserted into code to circumvent, or otherwise undermine, security measures in order to enable third parties.

Backdoors are in the news again, thanks to the U.K. going after Apple ’s encrypted iCloud backups.

But over the years , the word has been used to label a wide range of attempts to degrade, circumvent, or otherwise compromise the data security enabled by encryption.

Backdoors don’t always have to be secret, but they can come back to bite their creators.

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